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Sunday, May 11, 2014

Power of the Pie

I don’t know whether
the pie was as good as it looked, and I wouldn’t have been an effective judge
of that anyway, because I didn’t really like fruit, with the exception of
bananas (of course), but this was an apple pie. At least we both agreed it
looked impressive, for a pie - substantial and symmetrical and bulging. Matthew
filmed it from several angles as I held it in my hands, and then we put the lid
back on the box while we walked to the elevator bank. It was around 10.40 am –
we’d planned to be there at 10.30, but there’d been a mix-up about the location
of the pie shop. Either way, the lobby was largely empty, as we’d expected, and
the guy behind the desk was looking the other way. We agreed we were ready.
Matthew stood at the far side of the lobby, lifted the camera and gave me the
go-ahead. I pressed the button and waited. A door opened on the south elevator
bank, and then another – I let them go, because we needed to be facing north.
It was third time lucky. Someone got out without glancing at us; no one else
was watching. I entered the elevator, took the pie out of the box and placed it
in the middle of the floor, then I pressed 42, the highest floor, and stepped
out before the door started closing. I waited a second to make sure it was
heading up, ran to join Matthew. “Good work buddy,” he said.

“I should place pies for a living.
Open a pie placement business.”

“Learn about the real life of pie.
All right,” he said, for the benefit of the soundtrack, “so the pie is on its
way up to the fortieth floor.” “Forty second,” I interjected. “Forty second
floor,” he said, “one floor for every, uh.” “For every step to the answer when
you multiply six and seven,” I said. “For every crossing on Broadway on the way
to Forty Second street.” “All right,” he said. “So now we wait to find out the
answer to the question: what happens to an apple pie that gets sent up by
itself to the forty second floor. And I will stick to my previously expressed
opinion that an apple pie that gets sent by itself up to the forty second floor
doesn’t come back. We may never know exactly what happens to it, but it doesn’t
come back. Whereas on the other hand, my friend here…”

“I think it comes back,” I said.
“Because we know no one’s going to pick up and eat a pie they find on the floor
of an elevator. But also, people who work in office towers are lazy and
complacent and they only care about their own asses. Unless it’s their job to
pick stuff up, they’re just going to work around it. So unless we get unlucky,
and the janitor, or whoever has that job…”

“,,,of de-placing the pies…”

“…yeah, unless the pie deplacement person
happens to get on the elevator in the next few minutes, then it’ll just stay
there, and eventually come back down. Pretty much in the same condition it went
up in, because it’s not busy enough for anyone to accidentally step into it.”

“So this is an argument about human
engagement,” said Matthew, “because basically, I’m betting that someone engages
with the pie in some way.”

“And we’re both betting no one takes
the pie for a bomb and hits the alarm.”

“No, that would just be in the
Paranoid States of America.”

“Using an apple pie bomb in Canada
wouldn’t carry the same symbolic resonance.”

“It would have to be a maple leaf
bomb or something.”

“But let’s not get into the hockey
team.”

We went on like that for a while,
killing time. It seemed like the doors of all the other elevators opened and
closed several times. We started to speculate it might have malfunctioned, and
then debated whether the pie could possibly have caused that. “I don’t think
elevators have any open machinery or anything that a pie could slip into,” said
Matthew. “If they did, people would get their feet caught in there and every
day would be a lawsuit.”

At least semi-seriously, I said:
“Maybe they’re checking the security cameras. Maybe they’re watching us right
now, waiting to take us down. We should get out of here.”

“Office buildings don’t have SWAT
teams on-hand. All they have is that guy on the desk, and I’m pretty sure we
can outrun him.” The doors opened as he said that. One man came out. He came
out like someone who was used to being watched when he entered a new space. The
creases on his suit were so sharp you could almost feel them against your face.
He was carrying the pie. He took a few steps, stopped and stared into it.A woman greeted him, as she walked past him
into the elevator, but he didn’t respond. I could feel Matthew trembling next
to me.

The man lifted up his head and
roared - a sick, unleashed roar that shouldn’t have been possible unless a limb
was being amputated or something like that, and although I could see he was
still standing there in his immaculate suit that shimmered like a winter lake,
his roar made me see blood spattering from all his limbs and onto the marble
walls and onto the shocked people around him, even though I knew there was no blood,
only noise. He raised his arms, in something between ceremony and compulsion,
and then he brought his hands together and crushed the pie between them. A few
small pieces flew, but mostly it remained between his hands, like the mangled
flesh of some giant pus-veined insect. He wiped his hands on his suit, over and
over, and his roaring became more like sobbing, but still so loud you couldn’t
take it for sadness or even anguish. It was like a total rejection of himself
and everything he’d ever known or seen or felt. The empty lobby somehow became
full, with people simultaneously drawn to and repelled by him. “Oh Jesus,” I
said to Matthew. “It’s too much. What the hell?”

He didn’t respond, preoccupied with
zooming in and staying on the man’s face. I heard someone say: “That’s Tony
Sirotta,” and when the addressee seemed to question this, “I’m telling you it
is.” I thought I knew the name but I couldn’t place it, and anyway, I was
watching a man obliterate his name and all that went with it. He started to
smear the pie on his face and his hair. I think there were some words somewhere
in his hell-toilet-flush of noise, but I couldn’t make them out. Matthew had
taken a few steps forward; at least one other person was recording it on his
smartphone. “It’s not funny,” I said. “Switch it off.” “In a second,” he
said.He stepped closer again. Then the
doors opened on an empty elevator, and a man pushed Sirotta into it. He pressed
the button, motioned needlessly for everyone else to stay back, and the doors
closed on both of them, cutting off Sirotta’s screams in mid-retch. The crowd
dispersed quickly, leaving behind some strands of laughter and pity and
bemusement, and some scraps of pie on the floor. Matthew walked towards the
scraps and zoomed in; then he put down his camera. He exhaled. “There you go,”
he said. “Someone engaged with the pie.”

I was Googling on my smartphone.
“You won’t believe this,” I said. “That guy was a big shot. Former CEO of….” I
scrolled down. “I don’t know what all these names are but it’s probably one
degree of separation from the entire one per cent. We just spoiled every
expensive suit in Canada, basically.”

“So maybe he couldn’t stand the
sight of food that normal people might eat.”

“I don’t think we can put this up on
YouTube. Not the bit about us planting the pie anyway. I mean, the
consequences. The consequences could be. I don’t know what they could be.”

“They could be mind-enhancing,” said
Matthew. “Maybe it’s a message about breaking through. Forget marching and
setting up tents. You need to disrupt them on their home ground. Like
introducing one tiny virus into the software. If it’s done right, everything
melts down.”

“We’re not anarchists. We’re just
looking for an easy way to score some YouTube hits.”

Someone came with a mop to clean up
the pie. An ambulance pulled up outside. “Let’s just go,” I said. Matthew
resisted, so I said I’d leave him there; then he came with me. We walked to his
place, about twenty minutes away. I kept searching for Sirotta’s name on
Twitter and checking the local news sites. I didn’t see anything until we were
in Matthew’s place and he was uploading the footage to his laptop; then I saw a
tweet about Sirotta being rushed to hospital, and then retweets of the same
thing over and over, interspersed with occasional expressions of goodwill or,
more rarely, ill will. I drank a beer and fell asleep for a couple of hours.
When I woke up, Matthew said, “Get ready for this. He died.”

He had to say it several times until
I got it. At that point they hadn’t released a cause (later on they said it was
a rare condition amounting to a cascading shutdown of his vascular system). We
lit a joint and sat there turning things over. We didn’t think we’d done
anything illegal, unless leaving a pie in an elevator amounted to ‘reckless
endangerment” or “depraved indifference” or one of those conceptual TV show
crimes, which – even at this time of fear and paranoia - we agreed seemed like
a stretch. It seemed to us the pie had just been in the wrong place at the
wrong time. We decided to do nothing until we were forced into it. It took us several
more joints, and several beers, to reach this conclusion, but we were still
happy with it when we talked the next day.

We met up at his place again and
looked at all the news websites, and even signed up as temporary subscribers to
some of them so we could click on all the Sirotta stories. They all danced
around what had happened, referring to a “breakdown” or to “becoming unwell”
while he left the office. We watched the business channel for the first time in
our lives, but they just stuck to tributes, and to speculating about who would
fill various roles he’d left open. We searched YouTube, but nothing turned up
there. Still, we knew the wheels might take a while to turn. Police might be
scrutinizing the surveillance videos, blowing up our faces in readiness to
release them to the media, analyzing the pie and doggedly checking out every
pie vendor within a five mile radius. We decided not to go out that day, which
was easy because neither of us had anywhere to go, except that we were running
out of weed and beer, so Matthew volunteered to go out and deal with that.
Although I knew it made me seem like a clinging girlfriend or something, I
texted him at five minute intervals to make sure he was still moving freely.

We slowly eased back into our normal
routine over the next few days. Sirotta was buried. They ran out of things to
say about him. We never saw any mention of the pie. Matthew thought they were
suppressing it because they didn’t want to admit a titan of business could be
brought down by such a trivial trigger; he said they hushed up things like that
all the time – albeit usually sleazier things, he said, like sex orgies and
murders – for the good of the markets. I wished I believed something so heady
and elevating, but I thought they just didn’t care. The king was dead, and it
had a sound medical explanation. It probably struck people as odd he’d found a
pie in the elevator, but it wasn’t worth pursuing. If it was hushed up, it was
just out of kindness or rectitude. All we’d done was to add to the category of
things that one could tastefully choose to ignore. When I was feeling down –
and that’s where I was a lot of the time now – I thought maybe the shunned pie
was the symbol of my entire presence in the world, except that I wasn’t even
leaving scraps for a janitor to clean up.

But after a few months of that, I
was near Bay Street for a job interview, one mid-afternoon, and I decided
afterwards to return to the pie shop. It had been bothering me that I’d never
even tasted the damned pies from that place, and I thought maybe it’d help if I
did, even though I didn’t expect to like them. I bought the same kind of apple
pie, in the same kind of white cardboard box with a see-through lid. I carried
it home through all the suits and the professional legs and the index-linked
talk. And I swear that every ten or so paces I took down Bay Street, someone
looked up from texting, or threatening, or whatever, and saw the box, and saw
the pie in the box, and then looked at me carrying the pie in the box, and I
swear that when they looked at me, I saw solid, heart-of-the-matter fear in
their eyes. And then I tilted the box slightly so it was more visible to people
coming at me, and I swear it amplified the effect, making people falter, and
forget their place, and swerve out of any space I might make ripple. It lasted
until I was leaving the financial district, and then it faded, and I was among
people who didn’t see anything special about a guy carrying a pie in a box.

So then I felt much better, even
though I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t end up eating much of the pie,
because the crust was too heavy for my taste. And ever since then, whenever
someone talks on TV about “slicing up the economic pie” or deploys some other
kind of pie-dividing imagery, as people occasionally do, I always think they’re
afraid of the pie, and they want to kill it before it kills them.